Ethics of response-ability

You have encountered a “Great White Beast”- a fleeting, shapeshifting figure that performs the world as indeterminate. The possibilities of encountering a Great White Beast, is a reminder that there are no right decisions to be made, but that we are nevertheless to hold ourselves accountable to our own choices. When the world is ‘remade’ in each meeting, it means that there is an imperative to take responsibility for the intra-active relations we build and the future relations our actions make possible or foreclose (Barad, 2007 p.x; see also Rosiek & Adkins-Cartee, 2023 p.160). It’s a constant gesture to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016). In this case such trouble refers to the ontological turn in western scholarship and the “ethics of response-ability".

This ontological turn in western scholarship is controversial for multiple reasons – amongst which the tendency of such scholarship to either ignore Indigenous literature on similar generative ontologies, or appropriate them, without proper acknowledgement . There is, however, no ‘easy’ way out of these kinds of tensions. The ethics involved with drawing from such ontologies in academic work cannot be resolved through ‘right’ ways of doing things. Non-Indigenous researchers engaging any form of generative ontologies have, according to Rosiek & Adkins-Cartee , two options, and need to take responsibility for whichever option they choose: 1. engaging Indigenous scholarship, or 2. not engaging Indigenous scholarship. Neither option is “innocent” . Nor is not taking a clear stance towards which kind of future prospects one’s research builds towards. Not as an individual. but rather as a response-able agent that is entangled within larger apparatuses. The whole point for Rosiek and Adkins-Cartee is to de-centre the individualized human and make clear how the quality of our actions create openings (possibilities) within the flux of the larger, more-than-human, agential apparatus to which we tend.

In dealing with this Great White Beast, I have chosen to rely on a selective body of such western scholarship on the ontological turn, so that I could formulate ways of thinking outside of the classic western subject/object divide. Doing so, creates unresolved tensions around performing discovery like a modern day Columbus, instead of citing Indigenous scholars. I have nevertheless done so, as to not appropriate Indigenous scholarship in formulating my own understanding of ontologically generative paradigms. Where appropriate and part of my process I have placed my journey in dialogue with Indigenous sources. My own non-Indigenous positionality and the positioning of my research within a natural science-heavy research apparatus, that determine some of the conditions within which I conducted my research, have been key to such deliberations.

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